I applied online and was contacted back after a few days. Had a brief interview with HR about the position. Afterwards I was required to complete a coding test. After I turned in the test, I was contacted for a phone interview. The interview consisted of basic questions on my experiences and some questions on data structures. It ended with a question about finding the number of businesses through Yelp.

Interview Questions

How would you use Yelp to find the number of businesses in the US? 15 Answers

Start with initial discussion with HR.Technical interview starts with 1 hour phone screen.After getting to on-site, includes 4x 1 hour technical interviews, including with VP of engineering.Fast turn around, received offer within a few days of interview.

I applied online. The process took 5 days. I interviewed at Factual (Los Angeles, CA) in August 2015.

Interview

First had a Skype session with one of the software engineers. Passed that and went out to Los Angeles. There were 4 interviews and lunch. Everyone was pretty nice and they also gave a tour of the office. Know your basic data structures and algorithmsAlso know about big dataKnow how to design large systems

Interview Questions

Find a cycle in a linked listWhy do you like dataWhy do you want to work here 1 Answer

I applied through college or university. I interviewed at Factual (Los Angeles, CA).

Interview

Fairly easy going. Asked two technical questions, based on recursion and machine learning techniques. Talked a lot about the resume and roles played in different teams. They also had brought in an ex-intern, said he's just to watch and answer whatever questions I had. It was a 45 minute interview, with around 15-20 mins on resume and 25 minutes on questions.

Interview Questions

Find the longest time a process will take to run given different inter process dependencies. Answer Question

I applied through an employee referral. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Factual (Los Angeles, CA).

Interview

I interviewed with Factual in the fall during which I was also interviewing with several other companies. I really enjoyed the interview experience (more detail bellow). Come time to decide among multiple offers Factual really stood out in their professionalism during the entire interview process. They, more than any other company, worked with my career aspirations to carve out a role that was best for me. I really appreciated that. They also compensate competitively with Bay Area tech companies, which goes a long way in LA where cost of living is significantly lower.

Overall I thought the interview process was fairly challenging but not unfair. They tested me on the usual fundamental CS skills (algorithms, data structures, abstract design problems), but they also sprinkled in opportunities to show off knowledge of 'big data' technologies. It's not required to get the offer, but they're a data company that operates on a large scale so they're going to favor candidates who know about Spark, Hadoop, etc. If you have personal experience with that stuff it can go a long way!

Interview Questions

What are your career goals? How can we help you achieve them? Answer Question

The hour long interview is basically about one topic: Design a queue using two stacks. It is a textbook problem, not an interview problem. I think the interviewer just graduated from college and this is what he read from a textbook.

There is almost no programming involved, just talking. I wonder if I was interviewing for a sales position.

I applied through college or university. The process took 3+ months. I interviewed at Factual (New York, NY) in September 2017.

Interview

I had a phone screen with the recruiter followed by two phone screens and then the final onsite. I would say that up until and including the first interview i had as part of the onsite was very pleasant. As for the interview process, I think its important to keep a sense of professionalism with regards to a candidate's answer with regards to technical questions. After being unable to answer a question with two interviewers, they tried to abruptly end the interview. Not that one should get their hopes up obviously if they can't answer a question accurately, however it really did make them come off as arrogant. A great example is when one of the interviewers I had expressed his frustration with me not knowing about regex even though I had a web crawling project on my resume. Although regex is an approach, you can also check to see if a specific string is a substring of a larger string. I would've hoped that considering Factual uses a plethora of technologies, that they would realize there are alternative approaches and not just give me the cold shoulder since I didn't know about their approach. Because of this, I decided to drop the ball on the rest of my interviews. One of them said good luck on the job search and finding a fit. From what I could tell about the company during my onsite, expect nothing out of the ordinary from any startup: snacks/drinks, catered meals, not many red tapes to go through, and really just a lot of freedom. As for the questions they asked, without giving anything away, expect something straight from your college level coding textbook, a leetcode medium/hard level question, and two design questions. The design questions were definitely more appropriate for mid/senior level folks. Thus, for anyone applying for a entry level role, I do wish you luck if you are not comfortable in all parts of the stack. Considering not everyone out there is completely full-stack, I guess I do see why there were so many people who got declined an offer on glassdoor and why Factual is the size it is, despite it being almost a decade. As technical interviews don't always show a person's aptitude for success in a company ( for startups, from personal experience, I believe it's really about how much of a self-starter you are), I think Factual should ask more appropriate questions for entry level roles ( most companies do ask OOP design questions). Additionally, it would've been great if more people had asked me about my resume instead of rushing into the technical questions. Lastly, I'd say that really would've appreciated an email instead of a phone call, especially since they had asked for my availability the following week to recap what happened about my status. Taking the time to see what a candidate's schedule is like despite knowing immediately about the feedback from the interviewers is definitely a bad move on their part. I read below that someone from Factual thought it was better to have a phone call than an abrupt email. If that's the case, then why don't most companies do this...? At the end of the day, for anybody else reading this, do remember that companies want more people and aren't deliberately trying to make people fail. It is a learning process, and considering that Factual has been around for almost a decade, I'd imagine their engineering team will stay around the same for a while/into the future whilst growing their sales team. I had heard that engineering is around 40% whilst everyone else being 60%. I don't doubt the possibility that engineering would hit 10% in the future. I do wish them luck in hiring and look forward to seeing what most people say about interviewing with Factual in the future ( I'd imagine I won't be too surprised ).

Interview Questions

something straight from your college level programming textbook, leetcode medium/hard, two odd design questions which are more appropriate for a mid/senior level engineer Answer Question

Had two phone interviews, both technical. The first interviewer was nice and we spent time defining some APIs. However, the second interviewer seemed uninterested about what I had to say, and was not engaged whatsoever. We spent some time on a coding question, and he remained quiet the entire time, even when I was stuck. By far, the worst and most awkward phone screen I've experienced.

I applied through college or university. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Factual in October 2016.

Interview

I had a terrible experience- not with the interview itself, but with getting responses from the company and trying to actually get the interview itself.

I talked to Factual recruiters at my university career fair, and gave them my resume. I received an email within the next week, and I ended up scheduling an interview with them. When the interview date arrived, the interviewer didn't call me, and the recruiter didn't bother emailing me.

I sent the recruiter an email telling them what had happened, and the recruiter took almost a week to respond, answering with a vague excuse. She asked me if I was available for another interview, and when I told her my availabilities, I just got radio silence from her again.

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Interview candidates at Factual rate the interview process an overall positive experience. Interview candidates say the interview experience difficulty for Factual is average. Some recently asked Factual interview questions were, "Number of businesses in the US from Yelp" and "What is index in SQL and what is the tradeoff of using it?". 63% of the interview applicants applied online.